by Hesh Kestin
“Grief?” Jacky pulled the gun out of his waistband holster and handed it to me. “Flush this down the toilet, kid. Or keep it. Nobody should think I would cause grief to my old friend Shushan Cats.”
“The kid doesn’t want the gun, Jack,” Shushan said. “Put it back in your pants. I’m just trying to explain how things are in the east. You can’t buy cops for a few drinks and a turn with the stripper in the back room against the empties. It’s different here.”
“Yeah,” Jacky says. “It costs more, ain’t it?”
Shushan smiled. “You’re just the same as you were, Jacky. Kid, don’t you dare say it to his face, but they used to call him Sparky, because he could ignite in a second. Once I had to keep him from beating a guy at the bar half to death because he said something about Israel. I mean, that can’t be good for business, right? This man can go off, can’t you, Jack?”
“You call me Sparky, it’s okay. Somebody else, this kid here, he’s dead pizza pie. What can I say—I’m an emotional individual. My feelings, they just come to the top like the head on a glass of Lone Star and I got to follow them to the Alamo. That’s why I come to New York. Someone mentions to me your mother, bless her, is gone, and right away I go to the airport. Believe me, not even a change of underwear, which is okay, because I’m going right back. I got a nightclub to run.” He fixed me with his wet eyes, at once spaniel-like and yearning for approval and also threatening in case he did not get it. “You know what, kid? If you ever have a nightclub, or a restaurant even, watch those bastards like a hawk because they’ll steal you blind, especially the broads.” He rose. “Shushan, ever since you came to work for me my luck changed. You brought me the mazal. You showed me I don’t have to beat the shit out of people to get respect. You worked like a dog for me and those other four guys I don’t even want to mention—you know they’re using amateur strippers, just fuckin’ hick girls from like Waco, so they won’t have to pay for union talent? I was a organizer for the union in Chicago. A union man, that’s me right down the line, otherwise the rich bastards they’ll ruin this country.” He leaned down and kissed Shushan, who didn’t move. “And think twice about Jack F. He’s a good guy.”
Suddenly my hand was in his. Or on it, his fingers so thick and short it was like shaking hands with the end of a four-by-four. “Take care of my friend,” he said by way of farewell. “Or so help me I’ll put a slug in your gut, Jew or no Jew.”
“What the hell was that?” I asked after the door slammed shut, the man’s exit as noisy as his entrance.
Shushan laughed. “A poor soul,” he said. “Tell you the truth, it’s a miracle he stayed in business this long.”
“You worked for him?”
“I was coming east after the Marines. He and three other bars, they needed a bouncer. They were all on the same street, practically next door to each other. I used to circulate. Jack was impressed I’d been a Marine—from what I can remember he did his time in World War II in like Alabama, guarding planes—and that I’d been a prize-fighter. A guy like that, he grew up in foster homes, his father was a violent son of a bitch and his mother was nuts. So what do you expect?”
“Just to fly in for a short visit like that, he must really respect you.”
“Yeah, well, he probably reads the newspapers in Texas. They got newspapers there too, but with short words. Probably tomorrow morning he’ll be telling the strippers in his bar all about his trip to New York to see his pal the big-time gangster. That’s the way he is.”
“You’re no fan of JFK, is that it?”
“Bullshit guy,” Shushan said. “Bullshit president. Lets the coloreds get beat up trying to buy a fucking tuna-fish sandwich at a lunch counter in Alabama, so instead he persecutes the hell out of Fidel Castro. What can I say? The guy spends his time fucking starlets, fucking every woman he sees. You think he has the time to be a president?”
“I thought Fidel Castro was a communist.”
“Maybe now, but it didn’t have to go that way. Fidel, he’s a right guy.”
“Fidel?”
“Yeah. Fidel.”
“You know him?”
Shushan sighed. “I had certain interests in Havana. I mean, that was a great town. Rest in peace. Kennedy did that.”
“You met Castro?”
“When he was up in the hills, the Sierra Maestre it’s called, I went to see him.” He took in my skepticism. “At a certain point it looked good he was going to win it. Some people asked me to go talk to the man, before it was too late, help him out if he needed something—”
“Something?”
“Something, anything. Like a loan, or a pack of Luckies. Whatever. The idea being he would be nice to certain people, or at least not predisposed against, when and if he came to power. I went up there with a guy I knew writing for Life Magazine. Spent a week. Sweet guy, Fidel. Or at least he was. Throws a mean fastball.”
“You’re telling me you’re friends with Fidel Castro?”
“What’s the difference, kid?” Shushan said. “Nobody is going to care one way or another. That son-of-a-bitch Kennedy killed Havana. But he didn’t kill us. We’re still here.”
“We?”
“Me and you, and a few other people. You know what I think? Somebody is going to take the guy out.”
“Castro?”
“Castro? No, not Castro. He’s too fucking clever. Not Castro, kid. Kennedy.”
7.
By the third day it was getting lonely at the Westbury. In the morning Esther/Terri came by, delivered by Ira-Myra’s, who brought Myra, who looked like a sack of melons topped by a pouty mouth, tiny nose and enough bouffant champagne-colored hair to qualify for a drag show—clearly a woman who slept in her make-up. After a series of ritualized condolences, both took up seats at the far end of the room by the door in a kind of alcove, like a pair of foo dogs planted at the entrance. Compared to Myra, Terri—I couldn’t call her Esther, not to her face; she so thoroughly disapproved of the name—looked like a separate species: a semitic version of Jean Seberg, whom I’d fallen in love with on screen in Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless (for months after seeing this at the Eighth Street Cinema I thought I was Jean-Paul Belmondo, who thought he was Humphrey Bogart—resilient, romantic, doomed). Despite her short hair—according to the style of the time, mine was longer—there was nothing boyish about her. Her look was confrontational: she was one of those women, rare for the sixties, who looked a man up and down. If this was the bright dawn of the feminist era, I needed sunglasses.
“Not too much business yesterday,” Shushan told his sister. “You should’ve stayed over. We could’ve played Scrabble. We still could. The college kid here would probably beat us both.” He said it bote, though it was becoming clear Shushan was something of a verbal chameleon. When he talked to me it was almost standard English; with his business associates or someone with roots in the old neighborhood, like Terri, he seemed to descend, maybe consciously, into deses and doses. “You play Scrabble, Russy?”
“I have.”
“For money?”
“For money?” I repeated. “I’m not much of a gambler, Shushan.”
Terri glanced at me with interest. “Someone my brother knows who isn’t a gambler? This is rich.”
“Everyone’s a gambler,” Shushan said. “Gambling is part of human nature. Terri’s clients, they’re gambling if they talk long enough at so much an hour then they’ll be cured. You’re probably gambling a college education is going to get you further in life. On which the odds are the same as Terri’s losers.”
“Shut up,” she said.
“Yeah, I tease her. That’s the old story of brothers and sisters, right? So tell me, doctor. When you look at young Russell here, what do you see? I mean from a few words, body language. First impressions. Would you trust him?”
Terri examined me with her eyes, thankfully stopping at the neck. “With what?”
“Money.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Depends how much.”
“Your life?”
“I wouldn’t trust anyone with that,” she said. “You know that.”
Shushan smiled. “I would.”
From across the room I could see Ira-Myra’s perk up. Oblivious, his wife continued studying a day-old copy of the Daily Mirror, whose cover had a picture of Shushan, Sfangiullo and others—including me, almost out of the photo—under a headline as unpleasant as it was predictable:
MOB WHO’S WHO
AT CATS MOM RITES
“I wouldn’t,” I said.
“You wouldn’t if you was me, or you wouldn’t trust me with your life?”
Both, I thought. But copped out. “I wouldn’t trust me with anyone’s life,” I said. “I’m not dependable.”
“You did the funeral.”
“I thought maybe it would be dangerous not to,” I said, at the same time wondering why I was being honest. “You didn’t seem to be in the kind of state that needed opposition. Anyway, everything I did, anything I did, it was just a few phone calls. And showing up.”
“Are you afraid of my brother?” Terri asked in a tone so casually conversational she might have been asking about tomorrow’s weather.
“Afraid? Sure. Sometimes. Maybe not now. But at first. He has a reputation. He’s in the newspapers. He’s one of those guys when I was growing up it was always better to be on the other side of the street.”
“And now you’re on the same side of the street,” she said. “How do you feel about him now?”
“Hey, Esther,” Shushan cut in. “You doing a psycho-whatchamacall on Russy here? That’s not nice. Let the kid alone. He already said it. He’s no gambler. So why would he gamble on getting a stranger like me, as unfairly as I’m characterized in the public prints, angry? He’s more smart than that. Even if all that isn’t much true.”
“Anybody want something to drink?” I said, standing. “Eat? There’s cold cuts. Or I could order in.” From the corner of my eye I caught Terri looking at me, coolly evaluative. I could almost hear her thinking: Flunky. But I didn’t feel like a flunky. I felt like I was taking care of Shushan the way no one had bothered taking care of me when my father died. I’d sat through the week-long mourning period alone. Friends came and went, my father’s and mine. A few cousins. There weren’t more than a few anyway. Several teachers from Thomas Jefferson High School. A neighbor lady looked in from time to time. But that was it. I’d grown up without a mother, so I was used to it. But until I bumped into Shushan I never knew how much I’d missed. Besides, Shushan needed looking after by someone he wasn’t paying to do so. He could trust me that far. “Anybody?”
We were eating when the cops walked in.
Actually they’d been invited. A desk clerk had called from the lobby, “There’s a couple of police officers downstairs who want to come up and pay their respects.”
Ira-Myra’s looked alert, a guard dog with someone approaching the gate.
Shushan finished chewing on his corn-beef sandwich. “Tell ‘em yeah, sure.”
The two cops were Cohen and Kennedy, so mismatched a pair they looked like socks a blind man might have picked out of a drawer. Cohen was tall, balding, and given to smiling nervously. He had a face that looked like he was in the wrong job. Probably he should have been a salesman. He had on a blue blazer and tan trousers—a uniform of sorts—and he was one of those guys who had a five o’clock shadow at noon. It was now almost two. The shadow had lengthened. His partner was more my size, just under six foot, with chestnut hair combed straight back off a friendly face. He had bright blue eyes and a nice round nose beginning to show broken blood vessels, and even less sense of how to dress than his partner. Tie askew, his suit, shiny from repeated pressings, was that olive poplin half of New York wore in summer. This was November.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Cats,” Cohen said.
“Me too,” Kennedy said. “May your mother rest with the angels in heaven.” He looked suddenly uncertain, and turned to Cohen. “That okay to say?”
“Sure,” Shushan said. “You can practically say anything that works.”
“I wouldn’t mention Jesus Christ,” Cohen said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
There was something about them of an old married couple: they must have been together a while. When one moved the other looked. And when one looked the other caught his eye to say, It’s nothing—I was just shifting in my seat.
“Russy, give these nice coppers something to eat,” Shushan said. “And drink.” He winked. “Or are you guys on duty?”
“It’s a condolence call, Mr. Cats,” the Irishman said. “I mean, technically we’re on call. I mean, if there was a shooting in the next block or something. But the NYPD isn’t that technical about these things. A wake, something like that, it’s okay. Ain’t that right, Stan?”
Cohen nodded. “The last thing we’d want you to think is this is a police matter. It’s personal, that’s all.”
I brought them a mid-level bottle of Scotch and a couple of tumblers with ice. They didn’t hesitate.
“This is my sister,” Shushan said. “Ira you know.” He skipped Myra entirely. “And this is my protégé, Russell.”
The cops examined me with renewed interest.
I looked at myself with renewed interest. Protégé? Uh, do I get to go to jail now or do we wait until after the mourning period? “I’m just helping out,” I said weakly. “For the shiva.” I turned to Kennedy. “The wake.”
“Yeah, well, don’t worry, kid,” Cohen said. “We don’t have an interest in you. That is, if we don’t have no call to. Anyway Mr. Shushan here is a kidder. He’s famous for a kidder. You know what he said when we arrested him?”
Kennedy picked it up. “He said, ‘What took you so long?’ Ain’t that something? I got to tell you, Mr. Shushan, if every hoodlum in this town was as much a gent as you it would be a pleasure to be a cop. As it is, we got them dagos they’ll spit in your eye as soon as say good morning. They’re surly bastards is what they are. I’d rather arrest a whorehouse full of niggers”—he looked over to Shushan’s sister—“cat-house I mean, than one of them wops, and their ladies is even worse. You go to search their house they wouldn’t offer you a cup of coffee or even a glass of water. It’s like they take it personal. Like their husbands ain’t what they are, what they know they are.”
“My mother, my late mother,” Shushan said. “She used to say you shouldn’t judge other people, because maybe they didn’t have the advantages you did.”
Terri shot me a look, and then a wink. She had caught it as well. The cops never would. Ira and Myra had probably never read a book in their lives. It was just Terri and me. She smiled in complicity. I kept quiet. What was I going to say: Shushan, your mother was F. Scott Fitzgerald? Your mother wrote The Great Gatsby, on whose opening page Nick Carraway, the narrator, speaks that line? Instead I coughed, hard.
“You okay, kid?” Shushan asked.
I stood, swallowed, and made my way to the kitchen. “It’s nothing. The rye bread. I got a caraway seed stuck in my throat.”
I’m sure Shushan got it. But I wasn’t aiming for Shushan. I was aiming for his sister. Maybe I had a chance after all. She was stifling laughter. If you can make a woman laugh, that’s a base hit.
When I returned with a glass of water and a grin the cops were growing expansive on the one interest they shared with their host.
“Well, you got a chance,” Cohen was saying. “The papers like you, Mr. Cats. That’s something. I don’t think the Daily Mirror would want to see you go away. Every morning you’re on the front page they sell more papers.”
“Unlike the dagos,” Kennedy said. “Take a guy like Sfangiullo, they put him on the front page and everybody hates him. He’s just another bloodsucking mafio, know what I mean? And one of them is pretty much like the next. Carbon copies. They don’t touch nobody’s heart strings because probably themselves they don’t got a heart. With you it’s like Robin Hood or something.”
“You’re saying I rob from the rich to give to the poor?” Shushan said.
“I’m not saying one way or the other, Mr. Shushan,” Kennedy said. “I’m saying how people react. Okay, maybe there’s an element of, you know, the man’s a hoodlum. But it’s like he’s our hoodlum. Them dagos, they don’t have the sympathy of the working man.”
“And the working man, Mr. Cats,” Cohen said. “That’s who is going to be your jury.”
“And there’s going to be a jury because you two working men arrested me, isn’t that right?”
“Aw, that is so unfair, Mr. Shushan,” Kennedy said. “We arrested you because it’s our job. It’s like saying a fisherman has something against an individual striped bass. Or a hunter against a particular deer.”
Terri cleared her throat so vigorously it was like a call to order, then stood. “If it’s all right with Bambi here, I’ve got patients to see. It was so nice meeting the men who arrested my brother.”
“She’s just kidding,” Shushan said. “She kids too. We kid each other. Nobody is holding any grudges or bad feelings. Isn’t that right, Esther?”
Terri nodded. “I always find it odd how nice some people can be to those who hurt them. I see it every day in my practice. People come in and they’ve been maimed by the people they love. I guess it’s not so much of a stretch to love the people who maim you.”
The two cops went white, Kennedy especially, the color draining from his face almost perceptively, like wine out of a clear bottle. “That’s not it at all,” he said. “You got us wrong.”
“Maybe,” Terri said. “But all I know is that if my brother goes away it’s you two who sent him there.”
“Not at all, miss,” Cohen said. “That’s for the DA and the judge and jury. We’re just agents of the... of the...”
“The system,” Shushan said. “It’s okay. I never expected different. So you two guys, you have another drink. And you, Joe College, you make sure my sister gets to her place. This is a rough town. A person could get mugged on the street. Ain’t that right, officers? And with these two dicks up here with me the odds are even worse. So take a walk with my sister, kid.”
